This article outlines the main conceptual ideas needed to understand recent research on the neurobiology of interpersonal experience. It analyzes, at anthropological, phenomenological, and epistemological levels, how recognizing otherness and intercorporeity among humans changes the image of nature, suggesting a new relationship between living bodies, neurophysiological systems, and empathy. The hypothesis is that neurophenomenology—an evolutionary, multidimensional, autopoietic approach—can probe the preconditions for a phenomenology of intersubjectivity shaped by the neuroscientific discovery of mirror neurons. Neuroscientific data are interpreted through an interdisciplinary lens to offer a unified theoretical framework.
Humans uniquely create and manipulate models of reality, yet these constructs reflect individual life experiences rather than objective truth. This paper argues that exograms—external memory traces such as marks or objects—are the only tangible link between the brain, sentience, and the external world. Competency in using exograms became a crucial natural selection factor, even overcoming human brain atrophy during the late Pleistocene and Holocene. By tracing exogram use back through deep time, the paper develops a model explaining the evolution of human awareness, self-consciousness, and Theory of Mind, and why humans are as they are.
Consciousness is argued to be both epistemologically and ontologically emergent, meaning it cannot be fully understood or reduced to simpler physical processes. By combining emergence theory with algorithmic information theory in a thought experiment involving a basic nonlinear process, the analysis shows that emergent properties can develop in a physical system. Applied to the brain's neural network, this suggests that a reductionist understanding of consciousness is impossible. Further combinatorial analysis based on quantum mechanical limits indicates that consciousness is fundamentally irreducible to low-level phenomena, implying the mind-body problem lacks a reductionist solution.